


Jade Harley, Accidental Kidnapper Extraordinaire

by Trombonesonmars



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Accidental Eggnapping, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Drowning, Gen, I promise, Jade just wanted to do some science, Nobody Dies, Non-Accidental Eggnapping, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 07:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3166895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trombonesonmars/pseuds/Trombonesonmars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a research trip to a newly-discovered reef, young marine biologist Jade Harley comes across a Scientifically Significant find and falls for a trap intended for someone else entirely. On the other hand, if she makes it out of the conflict alive she'll totally get a killer research paper out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jade Harley, Accidental Kidnapper Extraordinaire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quietserval](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quietserval/gifts).



> This wasn't as shippy as I meant it to be, but I hope you like it anyway!

 

Your name is Jade Harley and you done fucked up. Well, you’re pretty sure you did anyway, as just after you rev up your boat to leave the little coral reef to open sea for more samples you are bombarded by a piercingly loud cry reverberating through your tiny boat’s cabin. Turning from the center console of your boat, you look for anything malfunctioning, but the only thing amiss is the fact that your cooler of ocean samples to your left. But boy is it amiss - you can see a sort of glow around it, more in your mind than your eyes, and you know that the sound is coming from inside it. Hastily, you unlatch the lid to reveal the large, intriguing egg you found exposed in the middle of an expanse of brain coral. It is phosphorescing in a trippy, purplish, black-light effect, and when you lock eyes on it, you feel like the shrieking is aiming straight for your brain.

Feeling lightheaded, you dart a quick look over your shoulder and the stern of the boat shows the coral receding as you head toward the relatively open water beyond the shelter of the atoll you’ve been researching the marine ecology of. You steer hard to port and gun the ship to head back to shore in case there is an emergency - you want to be within swimming distance of the beach. What kind of emergency you’re afraid of you aren’t sure, but you irrationally worry that the egg will blow up or something. Haha like anything that crazy would happen...   
  
The noise like a high pitched baby’s wail can’t let you think straight and you stumble over to where you set it in your boat’s little control room, nearly tripped up by the scuba fins you forgot to take off.  

You can’t explain why, but the burbling soul-shattering racket fills you with the certainty that you hurt it, you’re hurting it as it sits there motionless in its little tank filled with sand and seawater. Oh possibly existing deities, you have to put it back!  
  
If you where thinking more clearly, you might have questioned this impulse - Surely, screaming, glowing eggs hold some scientific value, right? And science demands that such things be studied! Also they can possibly be worked into research papers to improve your standing at the university, gaining you fame and tenure.   
  
At any rate, had you been thinking more clearly as you picked up the fishbowl-sized tank to hold it tight to your wetsuited chest, you would have at least thought of a better way to return it than by flinging yourself over the railing of the boat with it.   
  
Your boat presumably keeps on chugging towards the shore while your brain skips like a faulty record as it acclimatizes to the fact you are in the water now. Ignoring the boat for now (how could it be as important as returning your egg?) you kick your flippers and head toward the area of the reef where you picked it up in the first place.    
After a minute or so of frantic swimming you lift your face from the water to take a gasp of breath (you have somehow been forgetting breathe.) You look out over the gently rolling waves as they go abruptly still a few yards in front of you, the water a crystal aqua. There is a lacy, fuchsia fan coral you can see refracted under the water that marks safety, wait why does it feel safe, and the shrieking of the egg grows more plaintive, egging (ha!) you onwards.   
  
A few short, strong kicks of your lime green flippers bring you past the particular bit of reef and suddenly the shrieking stops as suddenly as it began. Dumbfounded, you tread water with the unidentified egg clutched to your boobs while you try to process.

Hm. Yeah, thinking has not been a think that you have been doing lately. Fuckmuffins. You give the egg in its bowl a suspicious look; it is grayish with purple spots and slightly squishy, silent now (how was it ever not silent?) and is filling your mind with a feeling of smug, joyous malice from within its lightweight tank. Was it excreting toxins or something? No, that made no sense...  
  
You purse you’re lips and inform it, “I’m going to study the bejesus out of you by the grblblbl-.”  
  
Motherfucker! Something just pulled at your ankle and suddenly your head is underwater. Luckily you are still wearing your prescription goggles and you manage to hold your breath. What the hell just… Holy shit! There’s a person holding your ankle in a crushing grip, glaring daggers at you, her sharky teeth bared. She has a big fish tail and looks intimidating as all get out. OMG you found a mermaid this will be the greatest research project ever. Provided you don’t die. Eep!  
  
The person’s nails (claws !) dig through the pant of your your wetsuit and into your leg, letting blood into the water. It opens it mouth to scream, coinciding with a shock wave that pounds out from her the water.   
  
Your air rushes out of you all at once as your muscles give up, heart and lungs included. Your arms release the tank and it drops. The mermaid releases you and dives after the egg in a dramatic swirl of pink eyes, orange horns, black hair, and a silver tail. After a few seconds your automatic processes come back on line, causing you to gasp a lungful of saltwater. The rest of you is still down for the count, though, and you sink. With your brain is cut off from usable oxygen, you begin to feel like you’re floating away.   
  
Your last thought before going under is “well, at least I died awesomely.”   
  
***  
Your name is Feferi Peixes and that leggy thief done GLUBBE--D UP one too many times. You’ve got your sweet little chuckle-voodoing egg back (it served its purpose as bait. Good egg, best friend) and the bitch  who took it is passed out like a chump with blood draining from the leg above one of its gross, stiff flippers. Settling the egg carefully into a divot in the sand – a jadeblood is bound to come by in a moment and situate it better so you just leave it in the glass cube it came in – you go about your duties.   
  
It looks like you’ve got clean up duty to attend to! Wouldn’t want creepy red animal blood from an air sucker polluting the water for the sweet little grublings in their eggs, now would we! But now the real question is, what to do with it. You swim up to it and sift through it’s black mane, looking for any exotic horns or pretty bits for your jewelry collection. Oh boo. It’s got no horns, fangs, or anything… on second thought, maybe you should figure out how it found the breeding corals at all. This could be really dangerous!    
  
Its face is going from siltblood brown to a purplish-mud brown, which is probably not natural. You lick the bleeding, broken skin on its leg shut, willing the blood to stop. After a few licks it complies, but the blubber coating the refuses to close. Glub, close enough!  
  
Satisfied, you grab it by an arm and drag it down to a more cozy depth for… whatever the shell it takes to make it give you the info you need.  
  
***  
  
Be Jade Harley ==>  
  
You would rather not because you are puking up sea water and it really sucks. Hunched over on your hands and knees you heave up bile-tinted water and cough. Eventually you manage to empty both your stomach and lungs, leaving everything hurting like you’ve been processed through a particularly tough grinder. Blinking muzzily, you find that your goggles fell off at some point, leaving the area around you a dark blur. Oh nooo, where did they go? You’ll need them to find where your research subjects got off to.   
  
Which is still almost certainly under the water? Your gut plummets even as your hands find the neatly folded rubber straps of your eye-wear. A voice somewhere in you vicinity “ahems” imperiously.   
  
“Hey, silly!”   
  
You slap on your goggles, and turn to the source of the voice.   
  
Yeesh! Your memories aren’t too far off on this one – floating in the water and yet somehow looking down at you there is the mermaid glaring at you. Also, she is not wearing a shirt! You blush and avoid looking at that particularly ample section of her anatomy to notice that she is wearing a few strands of shells and pearls on what looks like a fishing line. And yup, that fish tail is still there.   
  
Your inner 8 year old is arguing with you self preserving adult that this is the coolest thing that has ever happened to you. Your adult self acknowledges that there does appears to be an awesome as fuck mermaid-like creature, but counters that you are somehow underwater, but still breathing and not dead, which needs to be figured out before any squeeing can commence.   
  
The mermaid, for lack of a better word, has a webbed hand pressed against something like a force field around you, which upon observation appears to be some sort of dome. Her voice sounds like it is emanating from every point along the dome’s interior  
  
“You! What’s the big idea stealing our little fries from my reef?”  
  
The first thing to pop into your head is an image of a mermaid  eating a burger and fries in a cafeteria and can’t help giggling despite the situation. The marine biologist has a more sensible explanation, however  
  
“Do you mean like baby fish?” you echo dumbly, until it comes to you.   
  
“Those would be awfully big fish, unless… Omigosh, are those baby mermaids?” That could possibly explain it’s sirenesque call –  
  
The adult scientist Jade is getting more on board with 8 year-old Jade’s enthusiasm. The moral implications, however, are rather sickening when you realize that you JUST KIDNAPPED A BABY. Or fetus? Who knew.   
  
You feel you face drain of blood, thinking what most humans would do to those who kidnapped their babies.   
  
“Oh no, I’m SO SORRY. I didn’t know! Is it okay now?”  
  
As you have been talking the mermaid has been narrowing her eyes at you more and more.   
  
She shrugs dismissively. “Enough! We both know that was fifth egg in as many nights you have poached, so clam yup and quit the innocent act. I am more than capable of taking care of them them now that I have my CULLprit.”  
  
Well, that’s just not true! “Hey now, I got to this atoll yesterday, I couldn’t have possibly stolen those eggs. Except for the one just now, but I didn’t mean to, honest!”  
  
She doesn’t seem to be buying it. The mermaid narrows her big eyes, and hisses, sending shivers through the air in bubble. “Whale, when you put it that way, you are totally convincing and not suspicious at all! You know what, I am just going to leave you alone for a bit and let you think over where you his the other ones and suck up he nice oxygen that’s left in the bubble I made you.”

She calls out, “Have fun!” and then yanks her hand way from the clear wall of the “bubble.” Well shit. Looking none too friendly, the mermaid waves merrily at you before twisting her body away, tail lashing, and streaks away.  
  
Hoooooh, boy. It sounds like it’s time to guess how much air is in this bubble!  
  
***  
  
Be Feferi==>  
  
“You better not be pulling my frond, gill!”  
  
Kanaya Maryam, your head jadeblood, and guardian of the corals looks just as dismayed. Her ear fins drop.   
  
“I assure you I have searched every inch of the breeding corals, and another of the eggs located in outer reaches has gone missing.”  
  
Of course she’s not kidding you – Kanaya is hardly one to joke, even at her most lightheated of times, let alone about such a serious matter. You growl, letting your horns vibrate with the strength of it, stirring the water around your head into hot, bubbly jets. You are so sure that you had found the thief too!  
  
Kanaya and you are up near the surface, looking down at the expanse of corals, uncountable polyps quivering as if picking up on your ire… or more likely on the  turbulence caused by it.  
  
“So,” you say, “are there any signs as to who the accomplices of the airbreather might be?”  
  
Your jade-blooded friends is looking at you uncertainly. “Actually,” she sighs, “I found a message inscribed where the egg was last seen.”   
  
She points down at the brain coral below you,  and you power down to get a good look at it, irritated that anyone dare score the sacred corals that cradle the unborn mertrolls of your domain. Your protection of these particular waters is largely what draws your people to follow you, after all.  
  
You can see unnaturally exposed etchings in gray-white that mar the otherwise tannish surace:  
  
“Meenah was here, suckas >8D”  
  
You ROAR. “Ohhh, that beach is going DOWN!”   
  
Kanaya joins you and winces. “Could you please keep it down, you eminence? If wigglers can be make themselves heard through their egg membranes, it is reasonable to assume they can hear when you scream at the top of your regal squawkblister.”  
  
You attempt to simmer down, because she has a point. Seriously though, that anarchist scrap of scummy flotsam needs to SWIM OFF and keep her fronds away from your empire. It’s admittedly a pretty teensy one compared to the wide swathes of ocean the Condesce once ruled, but the point is that she’s doing it to be a little bitch. She doesn’t even want to rule, for crying out loud!  
  
Nevertheless, you lower your voice and lick at you lips in relish. In a sing song voice you assure Kanaya. “I’m am going to floss my fangs with her tendons once I get my fronds on her and I am going to LIKE it.”  
  


  
***

  
Be Jade ⇒   
  
Again, you would really rather not, as you are unsure how much air there is left in your prison bubble-thingy. From the looks of it, you are hidden in the shadow of a rocky out cropping, past which isn’t a heck of a lot of light filtering down from above. It’s hard to tell for sure without more data, but there is a high probability that you are down too deep to swim up safely on your own, even if you could bust out. If oxygen depletion gets too bad you could try to burrow a hole through the damp, sandy ground and take your chances, but the effort would use up your oxygen even faster, plus who knows if the… force field…? continues underground. Putting panic aside, you think your best bet is to negotiate for your release - hopefully your mermaid captor will remember to come back for you.   
  
The prison bubble is actually super neat, though! How does that barrier even work? Physics isn’t your area of specialty, but it certainly seems like the bubble is flouting some major laws.

There aren’t too many interesting things inside it besides yourself, but you have measured the inside with your feet to get the diameter and calculated the floor area. It is about the size of the dorm room you shared with Rose as an undergrad, but its upper curve is higher than you are tall when on your tippy toes with your arm outstretched and you can’t tell from inside if it is a perfect dome or more oblong, so calculating the volume of air left is difficult. The precise composition of the air is likewise a mystery and you don’t know how long you’ve been down…

Bluh, real-life math is hard when you don’t have all the damn variables! You give up on estimating how long you have left and flop down with a huff, pouting. The only distraction is some glowy lichen-like stuff outside the bubble, adhering to the surrounding rocks and giving off an eerie but somewhat calming glow. For a moment you think you see a flash of some gray and blue fish, but you don’t get a good enough look at it to identify it and it doesn’t come back. Boo.

You space out for a bit, observing how the glow slightly waxes and wanes, but the worry of being forgotten is stubbornly lodged in the back of your mind. To compound matters, you don’t have the best internal clock without the aid of the position of the sun, so to be safe side you try to relax your body, sitting cross-legged and hunching down to preserve body heat. You breathe as lowly and shallowly as possible while thinking of ways to look extra nice and truthful to pissed-off merpeople.  
  
**   
  
Be Feferi ==>  
  
Hm. What are the chances that Meenah would be in cahoots with an air-breathing, vaguely mertroll-shaped person? Her normal m.o. is more that of an obnoxious little wriggler set on being a thorn in your side. How likely is it that she would go to the effort of finding and retaining such odd and exotic assistance, especially when any mertroll would be more suited to the challenge?

Maybe the creature was simply hungry or attracted to the admittedly pretty polka-dots on the indigoblooded egg. It might have just wanted it to decorate its bower, which you would get, as you have collected a number of particularly colorful cuttlefish for the same reason. It seems pretty sapient, so how different could it realistically be, right?   
  
You could be in cahoots with it though! If it turns out that Meenah doesn’t know about it, then maybe you could use the creature as an unexpected element to befuddle her plans. As for how you would go about doing that you don’t know, but ultimately it would be pretty crummy to cull someone who was just going about its business only to blunder into a political situation way above its head. You guess you need to get to know it betta to see if it deserves a chance!   
  
It would be best to watch it a bit when it’s not looking to see if it’s up to something sneaky, so you swim as silently as possible toward the rocky shelf that drops down to the narrow crevice hiding the air bubble you made and its occupant. You peek over the edge, and see that it is right where you left, though it is now resting on the ground.   
  
It’s legs are folded together, kind of like a crab and appears to be unmoving. You can’t see from your angle if it’s eyes are open or not, so you keep trying to sneak up on it. Once you have glided down a couple of body lengths, it snaps it’s head around to face you. Its senses, then, are at least decent.   
  
It makes a toothy expression with it’s mouth that on most mertrolls would signify hopefulness. You go with that assumption and give it a slightly opened lipped smile in return. Your fangs are clearly superior to her blunt, irregular, manatee-esque teeth, so there is no reason to over-do it with a threat display. Plus, there is the whole thing where it is dependent on your mercy to survive.  
  
It straightens its legs out, holding itself erect. You swim down to be at its level, at which point it bends its torso for some reason. Before you get a chance to put your hand to the wall of the bubble, it resumes its normal position and starts moving its mouth, which is pretty dumb since any noise it makes is obviously going to stay put, separate as its air is from the surrounding water.   
  
Helpfully, you mime for her to cease gabbing by gnashing your teeth together and exaggeratedly closing your black lips in front of them. It tilts its head as if in confusion, looking faintly ridiculous as it blinks eyes that are oddly modified by a removable ocular covering. Quickly bending and unbending its torso again and keeps its mouth shut this time.   
  
Weird but perhaps serviceable manners are a good thing! You deign to place your hand on the bubble and begin you first venture into proper interrogation. You stare it, blinking your second clear set of eyelids to show your guard isn’t down. “Meenah just told me aboat her silly plan, you know.” It looks nonplussed and generally more interested in your hand than anything else, holding its own webbed hand out and flexing it in mimicry.  
  
Twisting its mouth into a grimace, it knits its eyebrows. “Uhhh, who’s that? I don’t know any Nina.”   
  
Ugh, it can’t even say a simple name right. You correct her. “Meenah Peixes. And don’t play dumb - as she has been known to brag, she is kinda a big fish around here. She may be an idiot, but since she and her school of faithless cronies have been keeping empire from expanding, she’s not entirely wrong. Since you glubbed up she says I could have my way with you, however I please.” You keep your face as casual and haughty as possible so as to not show your hand.  
  
It scrunches up its nose, showing some of its teeth in an unreadable, rather ugly display. “Oookay then. I really don’t know anyone named Mean’uh or Pay Seas, so unless you are conf… or, I mean, unless she is confusing me with someone else, I don’t think that story is true.”  
  
Aggravatingly, she seems to be following the early formula of the story trope wherein A loyal servant of a rival dignitary feigns ignorance of said rival during an interrogation to avoid being punished for the resulting guilt by association and A confused bystander who really doesn’t know what the interrogarch is glubbing on about maintains their position of innocence. They are awfully similar scripts, is the thing.   
  
At your noncommittal silence, it continues, “But I don’t see how that person could be a bigger deal than you are. Aren’t you the one who’s in charge around here?”  
  
Now that’s the attitude you like to hear. You flash all your teeth at it and pointedly use your free hand to tuck a snarl of your hair back to show your hard-earned, shiny gold tiara. This may work out after all.  
  
***

Be Jade⇒   
  
Apparently flattery is the quickest path to a mermaid’s heart. Who knew?  
  
At any rate, it looks like you managed to convince the mermaid “empress” calling herself Feferi (isn’t that something to do with cuttlefish?) that you aren’t an egg-napper, or at least not a serial one. The fact that you’re not in cahoots with this Meenah person seems nearly as important to her, so if that’s innocent enough for her, it’s innocent enough for you.  
  
Upon acquiring your solemn vow to serve her “glorious empire” (which so far as you can tell comprises about two nautical square miles of water around the atoll) she grilled you for a list of your abilities. She has assigned you scout duty on her current mission to catch Meenah and MAKE HER PAY, in return phasing some of the glowy algae into your bubble. She informs you that she raised it for many “sweeps” under the influences of Life and Breath and that it will keep your little bubble oxygenated. To you that sounds an awful lot like regular algae that has been modified through breeding into being more efficient at creating oxygen waste. Po-tay-o/Po-tah-to you guess!

At any rate, you are going to be “escorted” to the surface to and then to shore so that you can gather up you boat and some sonar equipment so that you can track an unauthorized forays into the corals. Then all you have to do is report sightings of “mertroll-sized” presences to Feferi.  
  
You conveniently fail to mention that you have a satellite-phone that you can use to call for help once you’re on shore, but the concept of remote communication seems like it would be foreign to your captor, and she predictably doesn’t inquire about it. These people are at a stone-age level of development so far as you can tell, so it is reasonable that satellites, electronics and long-distance communication in general would be beyond the range of their imagination.  
  
Basically, your inner 8 year old is stoked to be running reconnaissance for a mermaid and your adult self is stoked to not die of oxygen starvation in the bargain. Plus, protecting the young of a newly found sapient species is the ecologically and morally sound thing to do, so you really don’t mind doingthe job.    
  
The task of getting you back to the surface is not a simple one, however. You don’t know how she got you down here safely in the first place, but you caution Feferi to not take you back to the surface too quickly - the bends are no fun at all. Hopefully you’re not too far down and that won’t be a problem, but you have no way of knowing, as their measurement of distances doesn’t seem to correlate to metric or Imperial (ha) standards.  
  
Nervously, you stand by the edge of the bubble and breathe deeply to get as much oxygen in you as possible for the trip up while Feferi confers animatedly with another mermaid, just outside. You can’t hear what they’re saying, since there’s no contact between limb and bubble, but the other looks baffled, her short hair floating slightly, and a green tint to her twitching ear fins, her sharp, mismatched horns cocked to the side. At her side she hold a long, serrated javelin that looks life it might be the  broken-off beak of a swordfish.  
  
After a short conversation between the two, Feferi introduces other mertroll had been introduced to you as the other member of the “elite” defense team you will be working with, her Captain of the Guard, Kanaya Maryam. The other mermaid dips her head graciously in your direction and seems to ask a question. For a moment, Feferi looks confused, but then she bonks her forehead against the side of the bubble in something like a head-desk movement. She gets over her bout of exaggerated drama and asks, “I totally forgot. Water you called, anyway?”  
  
  
Hehe! You guess this Kanaya has slightly better manners then the Empress. There is no reason to keep your name a secret, so you reply honestly. “It’s Harley. Jade Harley.”  
  
Feferi beams at you. “Hi Harley! My friend Kanaya is a Jade too, so I guess you have something in common!”  
  
“Okaaaaay.” Somehow you think some wires got crossed there, but you smile like you totally agree. Yup.  
  
“Now that the glubbing pleasantries are done with, I say it’s time to get you back up there.” The Empress draws back her webbed palm for the barrier, and makes a fist, elbow drawing back and then slamming forward to rend a crack in the bubble. You hold your breath and are prepared as you can be, but when the bubble gives way with a pop, the ensuing shock wave and rush of water pressing down on you is terrifying.  
  
Kanaya darts toward you and grabs you under your armpits before twisting her long sleek body an shooting the both of you upwards. So much for taking it slow, you guess. Ahahaha, it looks like you and the bends might become acquaintances real soon.  
  
You squeeze your eyes shut in discomfort and cling to Kanaya for dear life.  
  
***  
  
Be Feferi⇒   
  
You  break the surface of the water and squint your eyes at the dry air. Your newest scouterminator is is now gasping for breath and tossing its head to get its sodden hair away from its rounded eye coverings. Conveniently, it breathes through it’s mouth parts rather than it’s abdomen like a proper mertroll, so you don’t have to lift it up all the way out of the water.  
  
You try to chitter at it to clam down, but have a hard time figuring how to get your diaphragm and voice box to produce noise in the thinness of air. Mostly you just end up burbling at it a bit in frustration as you start towing it to shore. After a couple of minutes, you figure out how to swallow the air and fill your flotation bladder, then pushing it out your throat and mouth while simultaneously engaging your vocal strings. All you achieve is a thin, quite whisper that’s more like a wheeze than anything and nothing like your normal voice. “Where exactly is your hive, Harley?”  
  
It twists in your grasp, hair flopped limply over its face, so unlike its pretty, floating length it was under the water.  
  
“Jade is fine! And it’s just over there, see?” It points not to a much nearby band of white sand seeming to float on sea with just few scrubby plants and rocks dotting it save for a bone white lump of… stuff that’s lightly flapping in the air current. A bit farther away, you see a large, silvery, somewhat barnacled thing resembling some of the detritus seen rusting on the ocean floor. Unlike those you’ve seen, however, it is halfway beached on the sand, making truly ugly noises and shaking.  
  
Jade swears and insists you take it there immediately so she can heal it. You take it as far to shore as you can, but you refuse to beach yourself so it has to paddle and crawl the remaining distance through overly shallow surf .  
  
The human - it mentioned down below that that is what its race is called - assures you that it will be back as soon as possible. Once it gets back on the driest part of the sand, it pulls itself up and sprints over to the sputtering, beached thing and does stuff it until the noise stops. It waves its hand at you and jogs over to the white lump.  
  
Whatever Jade is doing, it takes a while… you just float and wait, hoping it doesn’t do something stupid, like refuse to get back into the water. You can just call it back, but then what will you do with it? It goes in and out of the strange white lump numerous times, and emerging with a variety of unknown objects that are then placed in the thing it just healed. Once finished with that, it manages to push and pull the thing into open water before finally going back to the shelter one last time to retrieve a large black cube with many strings hanging off of it in coils.

Also, Jade changed her skin. Um. Well then. Gone is the grayish coating that covered it from neck to wrist to its legs where its spindly flippers legs its flippers. Where the blubbery layer once was, its legs, arms, and torso are showing the same dark brown as its face. Its flippers too are gone, leaving only blunt supports in the same color as the rest of the skin. Pulled across its hips is an opaque, blue net and on its chest is a similar covers in green that is small enough to reveal the fact that it possess a pair of rumble-spheres.  
  
It looks like Harley has been a female the whole time. Oops. You’ll have to pretend you knew that all along.  
  
She jumps into the floating thing, and does something that makes it roar to life. The contraption starts moving towards you, and you prepare yourself to be impressed.

 

***

Jade: Be Impressive⇒

That should be no problem considering how marine exploration is kind of your specialty! Also your boat decided to work, otherwise you’d be stranded, unable to set up your sonar equipment, and probably look pretty mutinous to the mermaid empress counting on that.

You go out into relatively open water, avoiding any corals that might be too close to the surface. Turn off the engine and just float, figuring the mermaid babies will get enough noise pollution from your sonar as it is.

The one mermaid adult around is looking at you like you grew a second head. Said mermaid uses her raspy voice and calls up to you. “You look… transfigured.”

“Huh? Oh, if you mean I changed clothes then yeah. That was my only good wetsuit, so it’s bikini and sarong time now! More importantly, let’s get the sonar going. Also, I want to try out the thing we talked about about.” You reach into your newly-packed supplies bag for an underwater microphone/speaker combo and lean over the edge of the boat to hand it to her.

“It’s an underwater radio I modified! It’s supposed to be waterproof, but we’ll see how long it handles being submerged for long periods. You can be my field tester!”

Feferi is carefully holding the plastic earpiece in a cupped, webbed hand, not looking nearly excited as she should be at your neat invention. Considering that the most advanced tool you’ve seen either Feferi or Kanaya is the swordfish spear you shouldn’t be surprised though.

A few minutes of trying to wrangle the headset it onto Feferi’s, but she wants to do it herself but she refuses to take off her tiara and her huge hair and horns keep getting in the way of keeping things snug. You manage to solve the problem by cutting holes in an old, cloth swimming cap left over from when you last went swimming with your grandpa. You tie the funny old string under her chin to keep everything in place.

She looks a little incongruous what with being topless and wearing an old-timey bathing cap that nowhere nearly contains the mass of her hair. On the other hand, some peliminary testing shows that the device works great! Her voice is much easier to understand when it’s underwater, sounding more like what you think a pretty mermaid should sound like and less like a snake with a tracheotomy.

After swimming to different distances and depths to verify, Feferi ollies outie to patrol the perimeter of the reef with Kanaya, leaving you alone for the first time in… not very many hours, really. You went out exploring a little after sunrise and the sun is only now starting to edge down near the horizon.

You look at your on-board clock to check the time-- a bit after 1700 hours-- and cuddle up on your chair and pull a blanket over your shoulders. Training your eyes on your sonar monitor, you keep your handheld radio at the ready to report the first sign of disturbance to Feferi.

***

Be Feferi⇒

You’ve spent the past few hours patrolling around the reef in case Jade’s location abilities slip up when she contacts you. Her voice sounds distant and muffled through the receiver nestled by your ear, but you gather that she thinks two presences are approaching fast from the west. Assuming she is correct, it was likely the empress herself and one of her favored, enabling sycophant cronies as backup. You yourself only brought Kanaya as you don’t want to tip off your target.

Keeping a low profile as you head to intercept, you keep just above the sea floor, darting between a rainbow of coral, fish, and the occasional egg nestled among them. Your short, powerful tail and abdomen make it easy work, especially when you get to the occasional ledges free of live coral and you can dig in your claws to make hairpin turns, hugging the ground  
  
Jade continues to supply you with information. “If I had to guess their destination based on their trajectory, I would say that they are aiming for the middle of the reef, about where I am.  
  
You growl low, “But why? There’s aren’t even any eggs there.” You don’t mention that the entrance to the Mothergrub’s lair lies at the center of the reef, but the only one who knows what these tunnels are is you, so it’s a moot point.  
  
The only obvious object of desire there now is floating on the surface, and she’s talking to you.  
  
As if on cue, Jade’s abruptly voice cuts off before crackling back to life, sounding uneasy. “Ummmm, based on how they’re slowing down and circling the area it looks like they are definitely closing in on my coordinates.”  
  
Well, glub.  
  
***

  
Be Jade ⇒   
  
On the other end of the line, you hear some scuffling, but are disgraced from whatever your mermaid friends might be telling you when something thuds against the side of the boat, quickly followed by another. The sonar pings you’re getting are so close to you that they aren’t much help, so you rush to the side of the boat to check the situation. Are the “bad mermaids” seriously attacking your boat? Their relatively human mass would suggest that they wouldn’t be able to make much of an impact, but…  
  
Something crunches under your feet and that thought is utterly invalidated by the evidence. You lose your footing as the whole boat tilts, the handheld radio clattering to the deck. As you try to right yourself, a clammy, cold hand grabs at you shoulders, yanking out your center of gravity. This “yanking on Jade” is getting to be too much of a pattern.

You’re hauled up and out of the boat and on the way feel your ribs and hip slam against the railing- and you think you hear something crack, but you are suddenly plunged into uncomfortably cold water.

Unfortunately, you’re wearing your regular glasses this time, which slip off your face when you hit the water making everything go blurry. You slam your head backwards and are released. While you can’t see much, you do manage to make out short, black hair, a mismatched set of sharp horns, and smudges that might be blue and black fins.  
  
Before you can think of what to do with your freedom, you hear an underwater scream followed by a shock wave that stuns you for a moment. You end up swallowing a little sea water in shock and curse yourself- you just know what that does to the integrity of your cellular structure- but you resist the urge to throw it back up in favor of holding your breath. The feeling of water in your lungs makes it awfully hard, though, and the taste of salt makes you want to spit too.  
  
The mermaid who surprised you yanks at your hair, laughing with a voice not unlike Feferi’s, but with a stronger undercurrent of meanness. Fuck that. You attempt to kick at your attacker, but you can feel your air running out and lose strength.  
  
There are a few punches more to your ribs, until you feel your rib shift (it’s definitely broken now, ow.) It hits something you can’t identify until you feels like your whole body deflates at once. Oh no, your lungs are not supposed to be doing that.  
  
Your body at that point has no choice but to give up, and you gasp in, taking in water again and again despite yourself. Faintly you hear a cry that sounds like Feferi, but you can’t bring yourself to feel much about this. Your consciousness feels like it’s sinking along with your body– you’re just a chunk of tired hurt the vague shape of Jade Harley.

…

…

…

  
  
A slap to the face jerks you awake (when did you fall asleep?) and you hear Feferi making concerned noises, feel her hold your body close to yours. At some point she started stroking your hair? Wow, that’s nice.  
  
A brief volley of what sounds like an argument between her and Kanaya is exchanged, but all you can make out is the word “sorry.”

Your sides spasm and you feel Feferi dig her claws in deep into your flesh, through skin, fat, and muscle. You feel more pain than betrayal, but it’s still there as you blearily wonder what you did to deserve this. Mostly you feel the cold fear of dying.

That is, until there is something burning hot against your nearly numb lips. You should push them away, but it’s a comfort to be warm at least somewhere. As you slip into nothingness at least you’re not along.  
  
***  
  
Be the mertroll who just smooched Jade to death ⇒    
  
You can’t do that because you, Feferi Peixes, just saved Jade with that smooch!

Kanaya gently pulls the brown skinned girl away from you, giving you a look at your handy work. She is still unconscious, but past that she’s looking great. On the sides of her once blank abdomen, there is now a set of deep, crude gills glowing a faint blue and green from the aftermath of the Breath and Life you put into that kiss.  
  
For a moment, she doesn’t seem to be reacting at all, but once the last of the glow dissipates, the gills flap open and shut, filtering lifesaving seawater. Jade’s eyes snap open in shock, blinking red-stained eyes reflexively. You beam with pride as you are reassured you did good.

  
Kanaya heaves a sigh of relief, and the two of you guide your insensible new recruit to the surface.

She promptly empties her bile-sack, sagging against your and Kanaya’s support. Her skin is colder against you than it was before, but as you bring her closer to to you in a hug you feel her heart pounding away, even through the barrier of her breast-covering.  
  
Eventually she stops spluttering and figures out that while her air sucking parts might be damaged, her gills will suffice in taking up the slack. You see the moment when her eyes widen with realization. She pushes at Kanaya to free a hand and reaches underwater.  
  
Kanaya blushes and politely turns away, taking a sudden interest in the horizon as Jade very obviously feels up her own gills.  
  
She looks at you wildly, her hand still down there. With a wet, rattling croak she chokes out, “I have gills! When did –“  
  
“Do you like them? I figured you would need something to replace your airbreathing parts.”  
  
Jade’s amazed expression falters, and you guiltily clarify.  
  
You guess at what she might be fretting over. “Your lungfushes might be okay. I don’t know how well my power over Breath works on airbreathing parts, but it should have kelped at least a bit.”  
  
She looks relieved, her dark face softening into something more appropriately grateful. “But what about Meenah?”

Honestly you stopped your fight with her early, choosing to heal your intriguing new friend instead. You leave that out and reassure Jade instead. “I cut her and her blue-finned beach Aranea a good one, so I don’t think she’ll be up to hunting for a while yet.”  
  
Jade buys it and stops worrying,going back to generally looking like a seal that got spit back up by a shark. She manages one of her manatee-toothed smiles. “So, what are the chance of you being able to help me back on my boat, me not dying of respiratory distress, and getting a message out to my grandpa for help?”  
  
You clap excitedly. “Shore! I would love to meet your grandpa!” If Jade trust this grandpa person to help her out when she’s vulnerable and thinks she can really get a message out, you look forward to meeting them.  
  
You call out to Kanaya and order her to help you assist Jade. “Come on then, Ms. Legs, let’s get a move on.”  
  
***  
  
Jade: get a move on ⇒   
  
All iterations of Jade are busy being stoked at being a fish person. Please try again later when squee levels have returned to normal.  
  
FIN

 

 


End file.
